The "best" programmer you work with can be fired on any day of the week if corporate wonderland doesn't hit its quarterly numbers. They know this and the ones who survive get quite good at getting others fired, especially people better than them.
I stopped caring too much about who the best in the room was after 7-8 rounds of this. As Nietszche would say these are not Ubermensches but the last men in a nihilistic swamp. Creatures who have attacked and destroyed older moral frameworks without replacing them with anything new. For their own comfort and survival.
The kind of people who pretend they have mastered complexity, but in reality its just survival theater and political/power games. Ubermensches haven't emerged yet.
When I first started programming as an employee at Travelocity I discovered a senior Java developer who was really good at CSS and JavaScript. At that time, around the beginning of 2008, there was a very clear division of labor between Java people and front end web people. Java people had absolutely no idea how to write JavaScript. It was so bad that Google wrote a tool called Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that automatically generated JavaScript from Java logic and it was beyond horrible, but there were some Java developers that really needed it.
What I found most interesting about this excellent developer, and of course she was absolutely excellent at her job writing Java as well, was her secrecy. She did not mean to reveal her ability to masterly address CSS and JavaScript concerns to me. She did so because she knew I was super new and it didn't matter. She did not reveal this to anybody else, because she didn't want to compensate for the repeated failures of people around her. In hindsight I can absolutely see why she went out of her way to suppress her capabilities while at the office.
The best programmer I worked with was the tech lead for my second job, at a startup consultancy firm.
He was brilliant. Could understand a very deep and complex business system and remember all the hundreds of table and convuluted logic built into the system, but it was a bit overwhelming listening to him talk since he would overload so much information in such a short time frame
Maybe the better word is clever or brilliant. I have also worked with other programmers who build such systems, I think the best programmer just builds simple things
There’s a type of programmer I’ve encountered only once in my 10 year career that I truly admire. They only way to describe this person is: professional but lacking professionalism.
They knew when to write code or when to stitch existing software together. The code they wrote wasn't easy to understand nor did it follow any good "software engineering" practice. But they could get an MVP out the door faster and better than a 5-7 developer team. This person was never arrogant and everyone from developers, customers and managers loved them.
He was my manager/mentor when I interned at Cisco. Very smart and humble guy and was always helpful. I tried though to stay mostly self directed and self reliant when solving the problem or task the group had given me. I eventually got stuck trying to figure out how to reassemble IP fragments into a whole packet. I probably spent a week or so, laying my concerns in group meetings, and trying to find the right data structure to do it.
Then one day, he gives me freestanding C code that was superbly written, with some macros for benchmarking, etc. For the most part it worked but needed some massaging for edge cases and such, but it was so beautiful and solved my immediate needs. I was unblocked but the whole ordeal has since been imprinted in my mind. He didn't give any context when handing the code, but I later figured out he implemented the algorithm as described in RFC 815. Deep in the annals of history and literature in networking that isn't really covered by any contemporary networking text books or sources.
Anyways now that I'm a mentor/tech lead these days, I'm always looking for my opportunity to help unblock someone by writing some very specific hard to implement code.
I have worked with several excellent, standout programmers at video game studios that had similar qualities. I'm talking in this case about ICs, not managers or leads.
- Whimsical, child like attitude. "Sure, I can do that" was almost always the answer.
- Would come in on the weekend when nobody was there and you'd see them cooking. Then on Monday, they'd reveal their work and it'd be something that seemed impossible last week.
- Had deep understanding of the hardware so that diving in and writing some specific assembly-like (or literal assembly) code was part of their toolkit.
- Were treated as a Goose That Laid The Golden Egg by management. Could do whatever they wanted, but they loved to work and code so it wasn't ever out of balance.
- After a few years of working at the studio they started to have mental health issues because there was a never ending stream of needs and problems, many of which were solved with them. Planning projects started to include several technical miracles they would pull off. It started to be expected.
Nowadays writing straight to the metal in video games is less common, so I think these types of guys have largely migrated to other fields. We used to write our own engines and there was more need for them. Now there's a lot more use of third party engines so there's less opportunity (and need).
Worked with many great ones but the one who really stands out seemed levels above everyone in terms of just raw intelligence.
When you explain a concept to another human you have to provide context and a certain level of detail. It can be hard to calibrate based on who you talk to. What always blew me away about this guy was he needed like almost 0 context, even for non-programming subjects. He understood within seconds what you were doing, even for complex problems. I had to recalibrate my entire approach to explanation with him because he got things instantly.
The best (algorithm) programmer I know routinely puts stuff in code that could be published in top engineering journals. He doesn't care much about publishing, except for some of his work that went into patents. I like him a lot but he is not an easy person to work with, especially if you are an engineering manager without some level of technical depth.
I knew a guy who wrote assembler for an 8bit pc without line breaks - he'd just keep typing to the end of the editor line and then continue. And he wasn't producing junk either, he made some really impressive games for the time. That's probably as close as I've seen to "genius."
That said, I wouldn't have wanted to work with him in a commercial environment. It was a way of thinking/programming I could never wrap my head around.
The greatest programmer I ever worked with was both a Linux admin and a developer.
He taught me that developers are difficult/impossible to control and to not be possessive or emotional about code. He also taught me tools and tricks in Linux that I still use today.
Michael Smosna asked what I wanted, when I needed by, and any clarifying questions, if the need arose. It was always good code, well crafted and documented, done by the agreed time.
I was there at her interview. I've done several interviews before - you ask questions to find out how much the candidate knows. She was different. Halfway through the interview, we, the interviewers started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
Her name is Jalaja Ramanadham. She became my manager.
I'm not an idiot. But I know when I've worked with better people. I'll shout two; Jeff Vroom and Alexei Zverovitch.
My manager at Microsoft, Dwayne Need. He is a principal engineer worthy of the title. I thought I knew C# very well before joining Microsoft ... turned out he was the person behind Windows Media Player.
I’m going to say Isaac Wasileski. While at Yahoo! In the late 2000s (when Yahoo! was still hot) - code reviews with Isaac were some of the more educational experiences I’ve had. He had such attention to detail and a very pragmatic perspective on coding. I always learned something from them. Hope he finds this because I never asked myself the question to be able to thank him.
It’s been a decade or so since I worked with Isaac and I looked him up to find he is at OpenAI. Fitting.